I wonder if people have tried the most recent W11 updates. It feels like a polished release candidate, and some in my inner circle also running W11 will say the same.

No, more like what the parent said. People hated visa with passion but I had been running its beta as my main driver for 6 months before it was released. Imagine that, Windows Vista beta.

The only advantage I had over the majority is that it was a brand new computer (with 2GB of RAM, wow) so I did not experience slowdowns.

Vista was better than XP in every way except performance on the low-end.

Windows 8 was an exciting change from Microsoft, but yeah some things weren't fixed until 8.1 and the damage was done.